Novus, 1999–2001

October 1999 — the shard comes online

The first preserved official news is dated 10 October. Novus was described as roughly 80 percent complete, with more than 80,000 world items, vendors checked in Britain, Moonglow, and Vesper, and all dungeons spawning. It ran in North Carolina on a Pentium II 333 over ADSL.

On 28 October, Probe moved the shard to a Pentium II 350 with 192 MB of RAM on a full T1 after deciding that home ADSL latency was not good enough.

November–December 1999 — the Classic foundation

Novus upgraded to TUS 0.45d on 4 November. A smithing exploit was corrected on 8 November, with Kho’saf credited for scripting and quests. Probe left Kho’saf as acting administrator on 12 November.

The planned 0.45h upgrade failed. On 22 November the shard reverted to 0.45d and an 8:30 a.m. world save. The next day, an OSI encryption change forced the client to 1.26.01. On 24 November the Help Desk of Hell disappeared from the help menu after players used it to escape combat, though its physical gates survived. Town fighting returned under trial rules on 4 December.

January–February 2000 — rapid engine changes

Official news reports TUS 0.46o on 5 January, working Chaos/Order warfare, TUS 0.46r with client 1.26.2b on 9 January, and TUS 0.48e with client 1.26.4b on 25 February. A March homepage capture described 40–50 peak clients and dated NOS Verdata.mul v0.1b to 15 December 1999.

August 2000–July 2001 — the large-shard years

Official news reported a 358-player peak in August 2000 and reaching a 400-player cap in September. The Nov. 2000 UBB index reported 1,801 registered forum members and 10,602 messages in General Discussion. A homepage updated in December described more than 600 active players and 390–440 clients online at peak; these are operator-reported values for that period, not 1999 figures.

Community records preserve tournaments in December 2000 and July 2001. NOS Stratics captured town maps, a five-part Newbie Area sequence, and equipment examples in June and July 2001. A January 2001 status observation recorded 283 connected clients.

October–December 2001 — closure and transition

The Russian Novus community announced on 8 October that the Sphere-era Novus had closed the previous day. By December, the surviving board was labeled Novus POL, and a transition thread clearly distinguished the ended Sphere shard from the POL beta while retaining Probe as a moderator.

2026 — NOS Redux

Probe and Kho’saf returned to the surviving scripts, worlds, public pages, and community record to rebuild Novus on SphereX. Classic uses the recoverable late-1999 foundation and selected later policies. Evolution will continue from the same persistent world rather than discarding its characters and history.